Planned Parenthood and the 'marketing of meaninglessness'

The message of my last book, "White Ghetto", is that the social chaos in inner city black communities is symptomatic of the cultural pathology gripping the nation as a whole.

Inner city black American life is a leading indicator of American culture and a product of the ascendance of materialism and relativism. Blacks have been first because they have been the most exposed and vulnerable.

When 20 percent of black babies were born to unwed mothers in the 1960s, this was sufficiently outside the national norm to be perceived as a uniquely black problem. But today, as the black rate has soared to 70 percent, the incidence of white out-of-wedlock births, now almost 1-in-3 three, exceeds the black incidence of 40 years ago.

The symptoms of social and cultural unraveling -- family breakdown, promiscuity, teen pregnancy, abortion -- are today increasingly manifested in white as well as black America.

Now, according to a lengthy profile in the Wall Street Journal, America's pre-eminent marketer of the culture of meaninglessness, Planned Parenthood, plans to help expedite this process and is retooling to go beyond targeting poor blacks to reach out to all Americans.

The article, "Extending the brand: Planned Parenthood Hits Suburbia," discusses how the organization is mobilizing its now-considerable resources -- a $1 billion dollar budget, with a reported $100 million-plus surplus -- to build glitzy new multimillion-dollar centers and express outlets in malls -- to reach women of means and everyone else.

Soon your daughter, too, can learn that the point of her life is her own pleasure and that other human beings, in or outside of the womb, are mere tools to be used toward that end. And, according to the organization's president, Cecile Richards, they want to reach young men as well as women.

What, after all, is our national specialty if not marketing? So, as Starbucks is to coffee, as Wal-Mart is to volume sales, so Planned Parenthood is to nihilism.

Until now, Planned Parenthood clinics have been strategically located in proximity to black neighborhoods and schools. But blacks only constitute 12 percent of the country. It makes all the business sense in the world for Planned Parenthood to move into the rapidly growing new Latino community and into mainstream white America.

Marketing itself under the happy face of providing "reproductive health" services, Planned Parenthood provides 1-of-5 abortions done in the country. Although the overall number of abortions performed each year has dropped, the percent done by Planned Parenthood has increased, translating in absolute numbers to almost 300,000 annually.

Star Parker is founder and president of CURE, the Center for Urban Renewal and Education, a 501c3 think tank which explores and promotes market based public policy to fight poverty, as well as author of the newly revised Uncle Sam's Plantation: How Big Government Enslaves America's Poor and What We Can do About It.